Assessing Smartpens in Teaching and Learning

An Extended Essay Presented to Mr. Edward Jay M. Quinto Mapua Institute of Technology

in partial fulfillment of the requirements English for Academic Purposes 2 (ENG11)

by Reymond A. Alferos Edward Joshua C. David Khent A. Mendoza Joshua P. Par

September 2015

Acknowledgments Sincere gratitude is extended by the researchers to the following who never ceased in helping until this paper is structured: Their parents and friends for giving them support all throughout the progress in constructing the research paper;
Ms. Michel T. Alferos, for sharing her time and ideas regarding the research, to make the research interview possible; Mr. Edward Jay M. Quinto, for being the best ENG11 teacher who guides and gives us advices and strategies on constructing our research paper; Above all, outmost appreciation to the almighty God for the goodness, kindness and divine wisdom He has given to us.
R.A.A
E.J.C.D
K.A.M
J.P.P

Abstract
This study was conducted to assess Smartpen in teaching and learning. This paper focuses on Smartpen, the features of Smartpen, their application on teaching and learning, impact, and problems on using Smartpen in teaching and learning. The necessary information for this qualitative extended essay were acquired through an interview with an expert and journal articles and online resources gathered by the researchers. Each of its features has different functions and possible applications. The use of Smartpen greatly helps the teachers and students in teaching and learning. The Smartpen can be used by the teachers to monitor the students’ studies while the students can use the Smartpen mostly in their homework and class discussions. Smartpens help students especially in the field of learning. It helps them in terms of improving their listening skill, augmentative communication, serves as an assistive technology and audio. For blind students it serves as a tactile graphics. One of the problems in using Smartpen is that the Smartpen has no editing functions which makes disadvantageous if used in recording the whole discussion. These findings support that the Smartpen have many applications and impacts that helps in teaching and learning. It can help teachers to record and upload online the discussions in class and helps the students in their homework in every subjects and writing activities online. Future researchers who will have the same agenda should consider pencast on using Smartpen. It is said that using pencast also helps in terms of teaching and learning.
Keywords: Smartpen, Dot paper, Livescribe, Assistive Technology

Technology has come up with different purpose in our lives. It is the reason why the world is turning into more innovative world. Technology has changed our daily lives and especially our educational lives Technology can be used as a tool in teaching and learning. Using it in teaching and learning is an innovative way to make the life of a student and teacher easier. Technology may be one of the reasons for a student to become more active in learning but on the other side there may also be some issues and problems on using it. Smartpen is a ballpoint pen with an installed PC and computerized sound recorder. At the point when utilized with an advanced paper, it records what it composes for later transferring to a PC, and synchronizes those notes with any sound it has recorded. This permits clients to replay parts of a tapping so as to record on the notes they were taking at the time the recording was made. Smartpen have the same size and weight of a substantial pen (5/8" x 6 1/8"), and is furnished with a removable ball-point ink cartridge, an amplifier to record sound, a speaker for playback, a little OLED presentation, an infra-red camera, and inward blaze memory that catches written-by hand notes, sound and drawings. The client can decide to record sound notwithstanding the written by hand content. Recorded sound is kept listed with the manually written content—tapping on a composed word begins playback of the recorded sound from that a piece of the recording. The Smartpen permits the establishment of the same number of uses as there is memory, and boats with a few applications. It can work as an adding machine, for instance, or can interpret words. Due to their preferences and information about technology, the researchers wanted to tackle about a study on Smartpen as a tool in learning.
The researchers aimed to assess Smartpens in teaching and in learning. Specifically, the researchers wanted to come up with the answers for the following questions: 1) What is a Smartpen? 2) What are the features of Smartpen? 3) What are the possible applications of Smartpen in teaching and in learning? 4) What are the possible impacts of using Smartpens in teaching and learning? 5) What problems can the use of Smartpens potentially faced in teaching and learning? Since, most of the students are being curious about this engraved pen. This paper will give some information about Smartpens. This paper would argue with the facts and claimed effects which students heard. This would also help students analyze on what they should consider before using it. Finally, based on the gathered and analyzed data, the researchers argued that as a result of, many people have been doing their writing in a computer and there are many situations that are need of pen and paper, the needs for Smartpen increased.

Features of a Smartpen Though Smartpen looks like an ordinary pen, it is actually a multimodal computer. There are some features of Smartpen that has their own uses and definitions. And those features are very important on the Smartpen. These features may be the main reasons on why this Smartpen is very useful. Also, Smartpen features contains dot paper with Dot Positioning System henceforth DPS, USB connector, built-in speaker, microphone and audio jack. The DPS, it is an innovation that empowers intelligent "live" reports utilizing plain paper printed with microdots. The Smartpen's rapid infrared camera peruses the dot pattern and empowers an extensive variety of paper-based applications (Tran & Lawson, 2001). For the user of Smartpen to be able to record notes the user must have this kind of paper because the Smartpen can only determine the dot positions. The paper contains a framework of a large number of microdots that make the page intuitive. The USB connector, this will be the one who will link the lectures into the computer. By just getting a chord connected to Smartpen and a computer, the user can easily put lectures into the computer. Built-in speaker, it is where the user can actually hear all the lectures that have recorded. The user can hit the stop button when the user is done listening to the recorded file and can also play it back and listen to it again to the entire lecture or either can just jump to the part of the lecture which is more specific. Audio jack, it is actually a part of Smartpen where any audio type that was recorded comes in. So take note that the user must not cover the tiny hole when recording any lectures because when played back and listen to the recorded audio, the audio file that the user will hear is not that clear or may be no sounds at all.
As a whole, each of the features of Smartpen has different functions and possible applications.
Applications of Smartpen in Teaching and Learning
A Smartpen have different uses especially inside the classroom. The Smartpen helps students in class lectures and different class works. M.T. Alferos (personal communication, August 27, 2015) claims that the students that uses Smartpen captures everything the instructor said in class discussion. In class, the Smartpen not only helps the students but also the teachers. In many classes, teachers present new material while engaging learners in a dialog that enables them to process the information more deeply than they would in a traditional lecture. Teachers can use the Smartpen for presenting new materials to the students.
Nowadays, there are a lot of different electronic gadgets that have been developed that permit the recording of lectures in relation to notes, but the Smartpen has amazing and exclusive benefits. Students can listen any time they want on some audios when reviewing their notes, but some of the audio parts and notes are not synchronized as they are with the Livescribe Smartpen. This synchronicity can exist with PCs with best audio recording capability, but these devices are more luxurious and less portable than Smartpens and paper. Furthermore, they lack the Livescribe Pulse’s capabilities of capturing handwritten gestures, the audio or note synchronicity, and the option of speeding up or slowing down the audio playback. The audio playback function can be sped up or slowed down.
Smartpen can be used in every subjects but it become particularly helpful in math subjects. (Netherby, The Pen That's Smarter Than the...Pen, 2011). Students that are recording their math homework and articulating the decisions that they were making can help the teacher build discussion into their math lessons making the lessons to proceed faster but understandable. The teachers can use the recording to see and hear how the students work through the problem. Since there are a lot of ways to work in an equation, teachers can also do pencasting in class to get students talking about the method used to solve the problem works.
As online education continues to expand, providing an exclusive service for students becomes more important. Smartpens can help take the “distance” out of distance learning by infusing an instructor’s personality into an online class. With writing and audio linked, pencasts also provide students with new ideas while providing a personal touch from an instructor.
The Livescribe Smartpen enables the teacher to address many of the limitations associated with data collection, analysis, and reporting of reading fluency especially in class assessments. Maintaining a record of in-class participation also allows teachers to share examples of in-class contributions with each student, fellow teachers, or parents, in order to demonstrate improvement toward a goal. Smartpen technology consists of five-pen like devices which are used for providing functions of a CPU, a projector, a virtual keyboard, a camera, and communication functions of a cellular phone. All the five pens are connected to each other via wireless technology preferably Bluetooth. The whole set of five pen technology is connected to the internet via the cellular phone pen. Smartpen PC technology is also known as P-ISM (Nayani, Bavisi, & Narula, 2014)
The application of Smartpen greatly helps the teachers and student users in class. Smartpen helps the teachers for discussions in class and the students in their activities. These applications may lead to the impacts in using Smartpen.
Impacts of Smartpen in Teaching and Learning The Livescribe Smartpen or simply Smartpen is a special kind of resource using in classrooms especially if one were really trying to understand the thinking skill of student. Teachers had the chance to use this in a research that they were conducting with school children. It could greatly support the recording and tracking of children’s performance. This product has the potential to fundamentally change education in a very positive and best way. This Smartpen has tremendous potential to help youths as they pursue their education. Some professors are extremely excited about using this Livescribe’s product to support much more in communication and teamwork. Because of its low cost and built-in functionality, it is obviously appealing to teachers and students. All these researcher’s or professor’s feedbacks will provide scientific evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of Smartpen technologies for improving teaching and learning. Smartpens help students especially in the field of learning. It helps them in terms of taking notes, gives them support in their homework, improving their listening skill, augmentative communication, serves as an assistive technology and audio. For blind students it serves as a tactile graphics. The Pulse Smartpen bridges that gap from analog to digital by offering the ability to take notes using the Smartpen and special paper, which converts the notes into a digital format for uploading to the computer (Clarke, 2009).
Other professionals have found that when students were given a lot of chances to view their recorded lectures, students who took notes and then reviewed their notes later performed better on recall test items about the lecture content than students who either took notes but did not review the lecture wholly and only relying on reviewing someone’s notes to study for the exam. The Livescribe Smartpen, the tool that makes pen casting possible, is essential in recording what the user hears or says while taking down notes on a specially coded paper that syncs the written word with the audio file (Netherby, 2011). According to the survey in 2004 that was conducted by United States Department of Education, both private and public schools has the average length of school day of 6.75 hours. They also reported that 37% of second year high school students spend more than 10 hours each week on homework. Given all these facts, the Livescribe Smartpen provides the support for students to catch up a detailed record of their teacher’s instruction for homework assignments. It is difficult to draw diagrams with a mouse or touchpad; and notes written on a handheld PDA device take 37% longer to read than notes handwritten on paper (Davis, 1999). True it is that speaking is faster than to type and speak; however, listening is slower than to read. Therefore, speech recorder is efficient especially to the talker, but sometimes hearing recorded speech is usually a burden on the part of the listener. This is the reason why Smartpen has accelerated listening software which can help students to easily record their lessons and later repeat it so that they can understand what was their lesson is all about. There was a study that was conducted at Brigham Young University and they have found out that there are a lot of benefits of this kind of Smartpen’s software especially for students. Assistive technology devices are any item, piece of electronic device or product system, whether gained commercially off the shelf, customized, that is used to increase, preserve, or improve the functional capabilities of children with disabilities. This is one of the main reasons why Smartpen was discovered to help and improve every student’s work especially to those students with disabilities. Augmentative and alternative communication devices like Smartpens are designed to enable communications among individuals who have difficulties in speaking, in writing and in language. According to Livescribe, Smartpen provides the means for parents and teachers to easily produce customized augmentative communication through lightweight Smartpen with paper. With the growth of the Smartpen, many possibilities have opened for the rapid creation of manageable and high-quality graphics. The Smartpen can be used to create and explore audio or tactile graphics through interactive figures that provide audio information about diagram features. The Smartpen is able to manage its page and also able to play recorded audios when they are selected through tapping. For example, a visually impaired psychology student could learn neuroanatomy by only sightseeing a diagram of the brain, with each lobe, gyrus, and sulcus’s name spoken as the Smartpen touches it.
The Livescribe Smartpen is designed, in particular, to support limitations of human data processing. All these benefits promise to make graphics meaningfully more manageable to blind and visually-impaired students, ultimately translating to improved academic performance. The Livescribe Smartpen also has a great impact in terms of teaching. It helps teachers in capturing class data, in assessing class participation and also in class assessments for reading fluency. Teaching a class needs the instructor to manage a variety of activities at the same time. In order to help students to develop abilities associated with a classroom dialog, teachers must deliberately facilitate student’s performance and provide supportive or corrective response to every student. In teaching, The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen provides the means for teachers to record classroom discussions connected to a system of marks on a seating chart allowing them to return it later in recording for the clear purpose of evaluating performance.
The Smartpen have many different benefits for teaching and learning that greatly helps the instructors and students. Even though there are many benefits in using Smartpen, there is still a flaw in using it.
Problems on using Smartpen in Teaching and Learning
Teachers and students who goes paperless mostly frustrates of the thought of switching the work in pen and paper to computer (Clarke, The Pen is Mightier, 2009). Using Smartpen have the ability to write down notes which then convert the notes that have been taken into a digital format and can be upload later into a computer, however this requires a certain special paper. (Clarke, The Pen is Mightier, 2009). Even though the Smartpen has its own benefits for teaching and learning, there are some problems regarding the use of Smartpen faced in teaching and learning. One of which is the problem regarding the recording using the Smartpen. M.T. Alferos (personal communication, August 27, 2015) said that in teaching the class the teacher cannot change the information that has been delivered and students may use the Smartpen for cheating purposes. Teachers and students who goes paperless mostly frustrates of the thought of switching the work in pen and paper to computer (Clarke, The Pen is Mightier, 2009).
Listening to the speaker while taking notes at the same time during the seminar or class discussion can be a daunting task, especially if one can’t write rapidly and legibly. Using Smartpen in these cases is pretty convenient because one can record while taking notes at the same time. Using Smartpen in taking notes can produce review material that are incomplete and ineffectively organized and can contribute to a students’ failure to record many important lecture points. These problems are underscored in research studies that have identified the cognitive requirements of successful note taking. Students with a Smartpen can record their teacher’s lecture while manually taking notes.
The recorded audio then can be played later by touching the notes the user wrote at that time. However, to perform these actions the Smartpen requires a certain paper to record the notes (Clarke, THE PEN MIGHT NOT BE MIGHTIER Than the Stylus Sky Wifi SmartPen, 2013). Using the Smartpen only cannot record the notes the user have taken without a special paper. In recording using Smartpen, since it doesn’t have an option to edit the work, the user must not commit any mistake while recording. If the user wants to edit the recorded work, the only thing that can be done is to start again from the beginning and record again which is rather inconvenient if the committed mistake has been done during long discussions.

The researchers aimed to discuss the features of Smartpen, its applications, impacts, and the problems of the use of Smartpen in teaching and learning. The researchers wanted to give the readers pieces of ideas on using Smartpen and how it could be useful in education purposes.
The Smartpen contains the following features; dot paper with dot positioning System (DPS), USB connector, built-in speaker, microphone and audio jack. Each of its features has different functions and possible applications. The use of Smartpen greatly helps the teachers and students in teaching and learning. The Smartpen can be used by the teachers to monitor their students’ studies while the students can use the Smartpen mostly in homework and class discussions. Smartpens help students especially in the field of learning. It helps them in terms in improving their listening skill, augmentative communication, serves as an assistive technology and audio. For blind students it serves as a tactile graphics. The Smartpen also has a great impact in terms of teaching. It helps teachers in assessing class participation and also in class assessments for reading fluency. In general, the Smartpen have many benefits in teaching and learning, but despite this there are some problems encounters in using Smartpen. One of these problems is that the Smartpen has no editing functions which makes disadvantageous if used in recording the whole discussion.
These findings support that the Smartpen have many applications and impacts that helps in teaching and learning. It can help teachers record and upload online the discussions in class and helps the students in their homework in every subjects and writing activities online.
The researchers recommend that the future researchers should aimed to research about pencast, how it can helps Smartpen users, and how it can help in terms of teaching and learning. Furthermore, the researchers also recommend the every teachers and students use Smartpen in school for educational purposes. The teachers should use the Smartpen to monitor the students and the students should use the Smartpen to help them in homework activities and take down notes in class discussion.

References

Clarke, T. (2009). The Pen is Mightier. Journal of Property Management, 57.
Clarke, T. (2013). THE PEN MIGHT NOT BE MIGHTIER Than the Stylus Sky Wifi SmartPen. Journal of Property Management, 43. Retrieved from http://irem.org/jpm
Davis, R. C. (1999). NotePals: Lightweight note sharing by the group, for the group. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 99, Pittsburgh, PA, May), 338-345.
Nayani, N., Bavisi, S., & Narula, H. (2014, October 1). A Review Paper on 5 Pen PC Technology. International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, 4(5), 3241-3243. Retrieved from http://inpressco.com/category/ijcet
Netherby, J. (2011). The Pen That's Smarter Than the...Pen. t\h\e Journal(10), 16-18.
Tran, T., & Lawson, M. (2001). Student's Procedures for Reviewing Lecture Notes. International Education Journal: Educational Research Conference, 2(4), 278-293.